However I really really like Hot Cross Buns, so I felt it necessary to bake them again this year. To me it feels a little like Christmas baking. You know with the oven on, baking, cinnamon, mixed spice, sultanas etc. Admittedly in previous years at Easter it wasn’t so cold that it actually felt like Christmas!

I haven’t been baking or cooking very much this month or last. Blogging has gone much the same way. My weekends have been spent almost entirely outside soaking up the first of the good weather, and in reality gutting our new garden.

However I decided it would be wrong to let Easter pass without at least baking something, so I opted for Simnel Cake.

Since I recently announced my semi-secret blog to the world, I’ve been having lots of discussions at work about food and photography. It felt about time that I bring in baked treats for the office, pictures and words are all very well but the essence of food is eating.

Yesterday in the UK the weather seemed to really turn a corner, there were blue skies, and you could feel the warmth from the sun. It was perfect and long past overdue!

I have been meaning to try these muffins for a while, originally because I thought they might give me a shot of sunshine despite there not being any really sun to speak of. However for once the recipe and the weather aligned and I got a perfect Spring muffins.

Recently I have fallen in love with ginger all over again. It all started on a cold blustery day, it was dark, and my head was all stuffed up. Instead of making myself the usual cup of coffee and choccy biccy to cheer myself up, I decided to try something a bit different and made ginger and lemon tea. It really cheered me up, it was so wonderfully strong and spicy. The next day I bought the biggest ginger root I could find and began to scour the internet for ginger related recipes.

There are lots of things I could have done with the last of my fresh cranberries, and fighting the temptation to just make Chicken and Cranberry Sauce again, I decided that it was time for another post on muffins.

With the last of my pumpkin I decided to make muffins, as although I love muffins I only have one blog post on them, the eponymous Coffee Muffin Recipe post.

Recently I have been hearing about the US canned pumpkin shortage but American’s don’t know how easy they’ve got it – I can’t find canned pumpkin anywhere! This makes it more difficult to follow the dozens of Pumpkin recipes out there on the interwebs, so I have had to adapt this Pumpkin Muffin Recipe from Smitten Kitchen.

The brown butter adaption is something that has been running about in the back of head for some time, I loved the idea of a nuttier buttery taste. This recipe like most muffin recipes use oil instead of butter, but I figured that substituting melted butter would work just the same.

The links in the recipe below, take you to subsequent pages of this post that explain how to make each ingredient from scratch.